John S. C. Abbott

“ Like the general upon the field of battle, he was simply to give his orders, and columns marched, and squadrons charged, and generals swept the field in unquestioning obedience. Though he had determined to ride over and to destroy the existing government, he wished to avail himself, so far as possible, of the mysterious power of law, as a conqueror turns a captured battery upon the foe from whom it had been wrested. Such a plot, so simple, yet so bold and efficient, was never formed before. And no one, but another Napoleon, will be able to execute another such again. ”

“ Napoleon's thoughts were of empire, of renown, of moulding the destinies of nations. They regarded him not as a companion, but as a master, whose wishes they loved to anticipate; for he would surely guide them to wealth, and fame, and fortune. He contemplated them, not as equals and confiding friends, but as efficient and valuable instruments for the accomplishment of his purposes. Murat was to Napoleon a body of ten thousand horsemen, ever ready for a resistless charge. Lannes was a phalanx of infantry, bristling with bayonets, which neither artillery nor cavalry could batter down or break. ”

“ But England, with her colonies, girdled the globe, and, with her fleets, commanded all seas. "France," said Napoleon, "must also have her colonies and her fleets." "If we permit that," the statesman of England rejoined, "we may become a secondary power, and may thus be at the mercy of France." It was undeniably so. Shall history be blind to such fatality as this? Is man, in the hour of triumphant ambition, so moderate, that we can be willing that he should attain power which places us at his mercy? England was omnipotent upon the seas. ”

“ The purest and the best in France, disgusted with that gilded corruption which had converted the palaces of the Bourbons into harems of voluptuous sin, and still more deeply loathing that vulgar and revolting vice, which had transformed Paris into a house of infamy, enlisted all their sympathies in behalf of the exemplary husband and the incorruptible patriot. Napoleon was one of the most firm and unflinching friends of law and order. France was weary of anarchy and was trembling under the apprehension that the gutters of the guillotine were again to be clotted with blood. ”

“ How impenetrable the vail which shuts their destiny from our view. The soul longs for clearer vision of that far-distant world, people by the innumerable host of the mighty dead. There Napoleon now dwells. Does he retain his intellectual supremacy? Do his generals gather around him with love and homage! Has his pensive spirit sunk down into gloom and despair, or has it soared into cloudless regions of purity and peace! The mystery of death' Death alone can solve it. Christianity, with its lofty revealings, sheds but dim twilight upon the world off departed spirits. ”

“ But upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? upon force . Jesus Christ alone founded his empire upon love. And at this moment millions of men would die for him. I die before my time, and my body will be given back to earth, to become food for worms. Such is the fate of him who has been called the great Napoleon. What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal kingdom of Christ, which is proclaimed, loved, and adored, and which is extending over the whole earth! ”

“ From being nothing I became, by my own exertions, the most powerful monarch of the universe, without committing any crime. My ambition was great, but it rested on the opinion of the masses. I have always thought that sovereignty resides in the people. The empire, as I had organized it, was but a great republic. Called to the throne by the voice of the people, my maxim has always been a career open to talent without distinction of birth . It is for this system of equality that the European oligarchy detests me. And yet in England talent and great services raise a man to the highest rank. ”

“ Bells rung, cannon thundered, bonfires and illuminations blazed, rockets and fire-works, in meteoric splendor filled the air, bands of music poured forth their exuberant strains, and united Paris, thronging the garden of the Tuileries and flooding back into the Elysian Fields, rent the heavens with deafening shouts of exultation. As Napoleon stood at the window of his palace, witnessing this spectacle of a nation's gratitude, he said, "The sound of these acclamations is as sweet to me, as the voice of Josephine. How happy I am to be beloved by such a people." ”

“ The invasion of France was abandoned. His whole energies were directed to opening for himself a passage back to Austria. The most cruel perplexities agitated him. From the very pinnacle of victory, he was in danger of descending to the deepest abyss of defeat. It was also with Napoleon an hour of intense solicitude. He had but sixty thousand men, two-thirds of whom were new soldiers, who had never seen a shot fired in earnest, with whom he was to arrest the march of a desperate army of one hundred and twenty thousand veterans, abundantly provided with all the most efficient machinery of war. ”

“ It is not strange that enthusiasm and gratitude should have glowed in the ardent bosoms of the French. In four months Napoleon had raised France from an abyss of ruin to the highest pinnacle of prosperity and renown. For anarchy he had substituted law, for bankruptcy a well-replenished treasury, for ignominious defeat resplendent victory, for universal discontent as universal satisfaction. The invaders were driven from France, the hostile alliance broken, and the blessings of peace were now promised to the war-harassed nation. ”

“ It was an interesting spectacle, to witness the tender affection, beaming from the countenances of these bronzed and war-worn veterans, as every foot trod softly, and each eye, in passing, was riveted upon the slender form, and upon the pale and wasted cheek of the sleeping Napoleon.
The artillery could by no possibility be thus transported; and an army without artillery is a soldier without weapons. The Austrian commander wrote to Melas, that he had seen an army of thirty-five thousand men and four thousand horse creeping by the fort, along the face of Mount Albaredo. ”

“ Napoleon, supremely devoted to the welfare of the State, seemed to forget even his own glory in the intensity of his desire to make France victorious over her foes. With the most magnanimous superiority to all feelings of jealousy, he raised an army of 150,000 men, the very elite of the troops of France, the veterans of a hundred battles, and placed them in the hands of Moreau, the only man in France who could be called his rival. Napoleon also presented to Moreau the plan of a campaign in accordance with his own energy, boldness, and genius. ”

“ Faint, exhausted, and her heart sinking within her with fearful apprehensions of the hopeless alienation of her husband, she received the dreadful tidings that she had missed him. There was no resource left her but to retrace the steps with the utmost possible celerity. Napoleon would, however, have been one or two days in Paris before Josephine could, by any possibility, re-enter the city. Probably in all France, there was not, at that time, a more unhappy woman than Josephine.
Secret wretchedness was also gnawing at the heart of Napoleon. Who has yet fathomed the mystery of human love! ”

“ The peaceful little harbor of Frejus was suddenly thrown into a state of the most unheard of excitement. The bells rang their merriest peels. The guns in the forts rolled forth their heaviest thunders over the hills and over the waves; and the enthusiastic shouts of the ever increasing multitudes, thronging Napoleon, filled the air. The ships brought the first tidings, of the wonderful victories of Mount Tabor and of Aboukir. The French, humiliated by defeat, were exceedingly elated by this restoration of the national honor. ”

“ In this emergency Napoleon displayed the same coolness, energy, and tact with which so often, on the field of battle, in the most disastrous hour, he had rolled back the tide of defeat in the resplendent waves of victory. His own mind was the corps de reserve which he now marched into the conflict to arrest the rout of his friends. Taking with him a few aids and a band of grenadiers, he advanced to the door of the hall. On his way he met Bernadotte. "You are marching to the guillotine, " said his rival, sternly. ”

“ It is useless to try to deceive us on this point. Will you have peace, or will you have war? If you are for war, only say so; we will wage it unrelentingly. If you wish for peace, you must evacuate Alexandria and Malta. The rock of Malta, on which so many fortifications have been erected, is, in a maritime point of view, an object of great importance infinitely greater, inasmuch as it implicates the honor of France. What would the world say, if we were to allow a solemn treaty, signed with us, to be violated! It would doubt our energy. ”

“ From almost every promontory on the coast of the Republic, washed by the Channel, or the Mediterranean, the eye could discern English frigates, black and threatening, holding all France in a state of blockade.
One always finds a certain pleasure in doing that which he can do well. Napoleon was fully conscious of his military genius. He had, in behalf of bleeding humanity, implored peace in vain. ”

“ Before Napoleon Marched for Italy, he had made every effort in his power for the attainment of peace. Now, with magnanimity above all praise, without waiting for the first advance from his conquered foes, he wrote again imploring peace. Upon the field of Marengo, having scattered all his enemies like chaff before him, with the smoke of the conflict still darkening the air, and the groans of the dying swelling upon his ears, laying aside all the formalities of state, with heartfelt feeling and earnestness he wrote to the Emperor of Austria. ”

“ For the carnage of the field of Marengo, Napoleon can not be held responsible. Upon England and Austria must rest all the guilt of that awful tragedy. Napoleon had done every thing he could do to stop the effusion of blood. He had sacrificed the instincts of pride, in pleading with a haughty foe for peace. His plea was unavailing. Three hundred thousand men were marching upon France to force upon her a detested King. It was not the duty of France to submit to such dictation. Drawing the sword in self-defense, Napoleon fought and conquered. ”

“ Intensest love and intensest hate can, at the same moment, intertwine their fibres in inextricable blending. In nothing is the will so impotent as in guiding or checking the impulses of this omnipotent passion. Napoleon loved Josephine with that almost superhuman energy which characterized all the movements of his impetuous spirit. The stream did not fret and ripple over a shallow bed, but it was serene in its unfathomable depths. The world contained but two objects for Napoleon, glory and Josephine ”

“ Europe chose war. By a majestic conception of military combinations, he sent Moreau with a vast army to the Rhime; stimulated Massena to the most desperate strife at Genoa, and then, creating as by magic, an army, from materials which excited but the ridicule of his foes, he climbed, with artillery and horse, and all the munitions of war, the icy pinnacles of the Alps, and fell like an avalanche upon his foes upon the plain of Marengo. With far inferior numbers, he snatched the victory from the victors ”

“ Many voices here and there, began to inquire "Where is Bonaparte, the conqueror of Italy, the conqueror of Egypt? He alone can save us." His world-wide renown turned the eyes of the nation to him as their only hope.
Under these circumstances Napoleon, then a young man but twenty-nine years of age, and who, but three years before, had been unknown to fame or to fortune, resolved to return to France, to overthrow the miserable government, by which the country was disgraced, to subdue anarchy at home and aggression from abroad, and to rescue thirty millions of people from ruin. ”

“ England is bewildered. Again it is proclaimed that Napoleon has purchased Louisiana of Spain, and is preparing to fill the fertile valley of the Mississippi with colonists. In the mean time, all France is in a state of activity. Factories, roads, bridges, canals, fortifications are every where springing into existence. The sound of the ship hammer reverberates in all the harbors of France, and every month witnesses the increase of the French fleet. The mass of the English people contemplate with admiration this development of energy. The statesmen of England contemplate it with dread. ”

“ Even the wood which burns with frugal faintness on the hearths, is borne, in painful burdens, up the mountain sides, upon the shoulders of the monks.
Such was the barrier which Napoleon intended to surmount, that he might fall upon the rear of the Austrians, who were battering down the walls of Genoa, where Massena was besieged, and who were thundering, flushed with victory, at the very gates of Nice. ”

“ Napoleon himself, with that wonderful magnanimity which ever characterized him, though at times exasperated by the hostility which he now encountered yet often spoke in terms of respect of the influences which animated his foes. It is to be regretted that his antagonists so seldom reciprocated this magnanimity. There was here, most certainly, a right and a wrong. But it is not easy for man accurately to adjust the balance. God alone can award the issue. The mind is saddened as it wanders amid the labyrinths of conscientiousness and of passion, of pure motives and impure ambition. ”